Books

If there’s one thing science-fiction writers love as much as exploring space and meeting aliens, it’s traveling back in time and screwing things up. From H.G. Wells to the recent reboot of Star Trek, time travel is one of the genre’s most well-explored tropes, but authors keep finding new ways…

Though telepathy and photographing dreams seems like the stuff of sci-fi, physicist Michio Kaku says science is catching up to fiction. In his new book, The Future of the Mind, the theoretical physicist and co-founder of string-field theory delves into the study of the human brain and these seemingly impossible…

Local author Colleen Oakes’s newest book, Queen of Hearts hit the shelves on February 14. To celebrate the first book in her new trilogy, she will be at Bookbar on Saturday , February 22 at 6:30 p.m. Oakes took a break from writing to talk to us about straying far…

Some novels take a while to get going, and some give you an immortal dwarf, a time-traveling corpse and an alchemical mystery before the end of the first chapter, as City of Lost Dreams does. The follow-up to the best-selling City of Dark Magic finds protagonist Sarah Weston in an…

It may seem downright unChristmasy to be talking about the dead, grateful or not, at this time and season. But if you’ve got an eccentric, contemplative, bookish, introspective type on your shopping list, then I have a suggestion: Dayton Foster’s The Dead Do Speak To Us…of Love, Life & Death…

As a member of Rabbit is a Sphere and Everything Absent or Distorted, Robert Rutherford helped bring some of Denver’s finest indie rock and pop to life. Those bands have since ceased to be, but Rutherford is still writing in the same idiom, even if the final form is a…

A trip across the plains over Thanksgiving reminded me how much I love Kent Haruf’s books — 1999’s Plainsong and its sequel, Eventide, at least. (Benediction, the third in the sort-of series about the fictional town of Holt, seems almost like a parody.) Haruf, who now lives in Salida, grew…

With Cars, Cards and Carbines, author Travis Heermann is aiming to bring some fun back into the world of speculative fiction. The forthcoming anthology — aiming for a December 2014 release and currently seeking funding via Kickstarter — is primed to do just that with a series of action-packed stories…

Poet and conceptual writer Robert Fitterman tackles a heavy topic in his latest work, Holocaust Museum, a recontextualization of captions for photographs displayed in the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Fitterman sees modern poetry moving toward appropriation as a means to critique and create conversation around a…

Is Lumber Baron Inn: Denver’s Mystery Mansion, Denver historian Phil Goodstein’s latest book, really about just one building? “Yes, it is,” replies Goodstein. “Compared to a lot of my books” — like the recently released Denver History Index, about where to find out more about the city’s past and present…

Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.

“Whatever a community goes through affects its artists as well. What poets bring to the healing process is a kind of articulateness, a way of expressing what many of us feel and need to find the words for,” says David Mason, Colorado’s poet laureate, who will be sharing poetic reactions…

With Halloween on the horizon, the time was right to touch base with Miguel De La Torre, author of The Quest for the Historical Satan, to find out just how scared we should be this season. De La Torre is an ordained Southern Baptist preacher as well as a social…

You can find a lot of interesting characters on Broadway, and this past week Mutiny Information Cafe added a few more. Painted on the store’s previously blank north wall is a mural complete with flying monkeys, alcoholic authors, a Westword Best of Denver cow and legendary blues guitarists — all…

Author/journalist Jennifer Egan, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for A Visit From the Goon Squad, writes with equal ease about punk rock, the ravages of time, the oddities of technology and, of course, the complexities of love. Goon Squad also has a strange focus on lists, and…

Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.

Our workaday world is so minutely mapped and Googled that we sometimes forget just how much of it was, until fairly recently, unknown and feared — particularly the sea, home of seals mistaken for mermaids and even more fantastic creatures: the sea serpent and the kraken, whales as big as…

Nuclear warfare, biological warfare, meteor impact, global pandemic, global warming, supervolcano, alien invasion, zombie apocalypse… sharknado? All are theoretical ways that human civilization could meet its demise. And while all are gruesome, most would allow the human race to depart Earth with at least a strand of dignity still attached…

Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.